The slow speed of a website and high page load times are probably the worst deal breakers at any online store. The bad news is that these two factors also affect the SERP standing, conversions and bounce rate of the store.
The good news is that if your online store is powered by Magento, you have the option of using cache plugins to speed up the store. Store owners have the option of several cache options for their stores. In this article, I will describe two of the most popular cache options for Magento stores.
Before I go about describing the cache options, I will give the readers a bird’s-eye view of what a cache really does.
When a visitor visits a page for the first time, it is stored in the cache. At every subsequent request for the page, Magento does not have to go to the server and the database to get the data for the page. Instead, it get the copy from the cache. This saves a lot of time for every request.
Magento uses a two-level cache system, by default, storing information in two backend. Although it is the default cache setup of the Magento stores, it is important to understand that this system is considerably slow. In order to maximize speed, here are two options — Varnish cache and Full Page Cache.
Varnish
Varnish is a reverse proxy that integrates with Magento at server level, with focus on frontend caching. When a request is generated, Varnish loads it from the cache instead of going to the server. As a result, every request consumes less bandwidth and the response time is visible reduced.
The HTTP accelerator can be used as caching reverse proxy and a load balancer. However, a common use of Varnish is to accelerate the performance of Magento stores by cache commonly accessed pages in order to reduce the load on server and the database.
Although Varnish takes the lead because of its long existence in the market, there is competition in the market that has proved to be faster.
Full Page Cache
Full Page Cache is another popular cache option for Magento (especially Magento 1 stores). The highly configurable module keeps server load at a minimum and improves response times significantly (by a factor of 6 to 25 times).
Since the size and requirements of online stores vary and customization plays an important part here, Full Page Cache allows selected exclusion of pages to fit the needs of the store. Cloudways, a managed Magento hosting platform, in partnership with Amasty integrates Full Page Cache for Magento 1.x stores. The good thing is that Cloudways customers could avail this great extension for FREE.
In order to substantiate the claims about the performance of Full Page Cache, Cloudways conducted tests that showed reduction of upto 175% in store load time to the industry average of 2-second. Check out the results of these tests in detail in this post.
Conclusion
The purpose of a cache is to improve the user experience and decrease load time Compromising on a cache extension essentially means high bounce rate and low conversion. Full Page Cache has proved to give better results making it the better choice for an ecommerce store.
